Smashing Magazine recently added a post to their site from Paul Boag which is a must read! It reiterates many of the reasons why our department began incorporating the developers into our initial conversations when developing websites.

In addition, the article reinforces the idea that we should stop seeing developers as the enemy or “those people” but rather as allies to the cause of creating creative and effective websites.

Every developer and designer has those days that no matter what you try or imagine, it just doesn’t work for your responsive site. Your idea may be a great solution for mobile devices but, it is not as user-friendly on desktop and vice versa. You use all of your progressive enhancement knowledge and yes, it is functional but does it really meet the need of the user? Does it really fit with the flow of the site? At times, the answer is no.

Here are a few techniques and plugins that I have found that have helped cure my…well, responsive headache.

At the April 2014 IT Forum, John Phillips and I had a great time discussing the differences between LESS and SASS, and how using a CSS preprocessor can decrease your front-end development time. All of the examples used in the demonstration are listed using Codepen.io. Codepen is an online playground for developing SASS, LESS, javascript and HTML. Feel free to play with the examples to gain a better understanding of SASS and LESS.

Also, here is a link to the PDF version of our presentation to download and review.

We have tried everything to tame the elusive HTML layouts. We began with tables, then divs using CSS floats and even changing the display property but nothing was easy without a number of hacks and feats of magic.

Now entering, Flexbox! The flexbox module is a collection of wonderful new CSS properties that I’ve been excited about since I came across it on www.css-tricks.com and even more so, when I attended a workshop at the WebVisionEvents conference in May. It is the true layout module in CSS without a framework.